Asoka Weerasinghe Kings Grove Crescent . Gloucester . Ontario Canada

June 25, 2009

The Editor
THE HILL TIMES
Ottawa

Sir:

I am afraid Karl Nerenbeg didn’t get the story completely right when he said – “Working on peace can mean getting attacked by hardliners on both sides: Looking back, now, the peace process in Sri Lanka seems like a golden opportunity that was lost.”

What I don’t understand is why Bob Rae keeps harping that he went to Sri Lanka several times representing the Forum of Federations and met several LTTE leaders as well as from the Government to promote his federal solution for the woes of Sri Lanka’s separatist Tamil war. If he didn’t get it the second time around that “Federalism” was an “F” word in the Tamil Tiger terrorist lexicon and they didn’t want anything to do with it other than wanting their separate, mono-ethnic, racist Tamil State, Eelam, then Rae was knocking his head against a brick wall and wasting his time. He saw these Tamil Tigers walking out of Peace negotiations six times sighting the simplest and silliest excuses. After arriving in Oslo for the last negotiations they didn’t even turn up at the table embarrassing the facilitators, the Norwegians. They used that trip to meet up with the Tamil Diaspora seeking funds to buy more weapons. That is how much these Tamil terrorists wanted to make peace with the Sri Lankan Government. Bob Rae knows it and so does Karl Nerenberg.

Nerenberg as well as Rae knew that the 2002 “ceasefire” was really a God’s send for the Tamil Tigers to regroup and rearm themselves, that provided them the window to bring in 11 ship loads of sophisticated military weaponry as well as four Czech built ZLIN-143 planes which were converted into night-bombers, to become the only terrorist outfit in the world to have an air wing. To ignore this reality by Rae was foolish, as there was no one in the world and nothing would have changed the Tamil Tiger leader Prabhakaran’s intention of wanting by hook or by crook his separate Tamil State, Eelam. And that is the only reason why he didn’t want to surrender which would have saved thousands of lives of his cadres and civilians.

There definitely was a conspiracy among the western world as well as some INGOs to help the Tamil Tigers achieve their goal which is now been revealed during voluntary submissions in Courts of Law by hardcore Tamil Tigers who decided to abandon ship and save their lives and that of their families.

The much accepted ground reality among the western punditry was that this was an unwinnable war, and that Sri Lanka might as well give in to the Tamil Tigers and let them have their patch of land, one-third of Sri Lankan territory bordered by 66 percent of the coast line for the 12.6 % of the Tamil population (1983), which has now dwindled to 3.9% (World Watch 2008), to call it their Eelam.

The ground reality was that the Sri Lankan Army strategic brilliance with no help from the western countries finally did the Tamil Tigers in on May 19, 2009, after Prabhakaran challenged them for the fourth time in July 2006 by shutting off the anicut at Mavil Aru, cutting off the water supply to 30,000 Sinhalese farmer families. The rest is history.

Asoka Weerasinghe